"What Will Become of Our Boys?" The Modern Mountain Man and Fading American Masculinity

Periodically, I watch episodes of House Hunters on HGTV about couples buying their first home. Most of the time it is centered around a couple who are changing jobs, moving to a new city, or have just decided they want to own their own home instead of renting. Depending on location, both people have high paying jobs in the city which gives them the ability to pay exorbitant amounts of money for homes either in town or in the suburbs. The camera is right there watching their every move, and if viewers are paying attention, it is not difficult to see how women today treat their men. Some of the most appalling episodes follow couples who are clearly not compatible. Those watching sense this, but the couple does not. Especially the man.

His female partner will demean him in every way imaginable. She won’t let him have an opinion, and when he does speak up, she shuts him down faster than you can say Jack Rabbit. More than half the episode is spent listening to her complain about how she wants granite counter tops, or that the master bedroom isn’t what she imagined. But when she does get excited, it is always about the size of the closets.

“Honey, this is the closet where I’ll keep my shoes. You can have the one down the hall.” Since she’s got him on a tight leash, he might as well have a puppy pad by the back door to complete the humiliation.

But he just stands there and takes it, never daring to disagree with her. It is quite embarrassing, and I don’t even know these people.

So my question is: What has happened to our men?

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, The Last American Man, she grapples with the problem of the disappearance of manliness in our culture by focusing on her longtime friend, Eustace Conway.

Eustace is a modern day buckskin wearing mountain man who lives in the forests of North Carolina. There are few mystical creatures like himself still living among us now, and their time is rapidly fading. As the world continues to move in the direction of modernity, men like Eustace Conway whose life goal is to keep the old traditions alive, are not needed anymore. The young men he encounters are lost in a world that does not acknowledge their need for a rite of passage into manhood. Today, young men are seldom, if ever, asked to depend on themselves for food, shelter, and clothing. Everything is ready made for their use and consumption. Compare that to Eustace who taught himself how to survive off of the land, beginning when he was just seven years old. He devoured books about Native American tribes, survival skills, and biographies of the men who had explored and settled America. He is a commodity in a world that no longer needs him because of its rapid movement into a future free of want.

Historically, after all available land was settled, Americans began to wonder “What will become of our boys?” According to Gilbert, young American males morphed into strong, healthy men by leaving the cities and striking out on their own, in the wilderness during the expansion. This is a far cry from the classic European coming of age, when young people moved from provincial towns to the city, where they were refined and brought up in the genteel ways of society.

During this short episode of discovery, the American mountain man was a creature with whom the Europeans were fascinated. Take Benjamin Franklin for instance. Part of his attire as Ambassador to France was a coonskin cap. Franklin was playing the part of the American frontiersman and knew that that was exactly what the French wanted.

He was a legend come to life.

Gilbert states that “everyone seemed to agree that this was a new kind of human being and that what defined the American Man more than anything else was his resourcefulness, born out of the challenges of wrenching a New World from virgin wilderness. Unhindered by class restrictions, bureaucracy, or urban squalor, these Americans simply got more done in a single day than anyone had imagined possible.”

These were men who got things done, who didn’t answer to anybody, and who built their own lives on the wild and expansive plains of America.

The hipster trend of wearing flannel, growing a beard, and being connected to nature seems to be directly connected to the original prototype of the mountain man. But even modern hipsters could not survive in the wild alone for months on end without an iPhone.

As in my previous post on Freedom Feminism, the culture of modern women have made it their mission to strip away any kind of opposition in their rise to the top. Feminists wish to keep the male species under their boot heels, not allowing them to be men. Again, this is the problem with modern feminism. Women are so quick to accuse a man of wanting to control them, but in the end, they just end up controlling the men. It is a stupid and pointless war that should not be fought at all.

On an episode of Trip Flip which aired last week, the host, Burt, took two high school friends to Texas for a week of work on Lonesome Pine Ranch in Houston. But they didn’t just sit around a camp fire and sing cowboy songs. They actually worked.

The most fascinating part of the entire episode was watching them evolve into cowboys. They were asked to help hold down calves as they were castrated and branded, run cattle drives, shoot six shooters, and play poker in the barn.

During a riding lesson before working with the cattle, the smaller of the two friends, Dylan, was instructed by the ranch owner to kick his horse into a lope. It was apparent that Dylan was frustrated with the owner because he kept saying things like “I don’t want to hurt him” or “I can’t do it.” But the owner kept gruffly demanding that he obey him. He was speaking to Dylan like a man and not mincing words. Dylan was irritated with himself because he couldn’t do it, but I think it was because he was not as sure of himself as a man should be.

The entire week they were pushed to go beyond their comfort zones and get their hands dirty in more ways than one. Both struggled during the process, but it was Dylan who had the hardest time finding his place in the role he was assigned to.

By the end of the week, all three men, including the comedic host, were different. They couldn’t say enough about how good it felt to work hard and actually accomplish something themselves. These men had truly become men in a short space of time because they were required to do hard things, to figure out problems, and to control huge animals without thinking twice.

Before their trip, these guys were much like the ones I mentioned in the beginning. Quiet, always bending to the will of the females in their lives, not being able to take control of a situation in order to secure an outcome. Their hands were not calloused or dirty, but all three began to feel the power that was handed over to them the moment they settled into the saddle.

So what is wrong with our young men today? Why are they not able to be firm in their convictions and take control of their lives?

Elizabeth Gilbert says it is because they lack the traditional rite of passage into manhood. One Native American tradition was to send a young man out into the wilderness alone for months, allowing no contact with his tribe. He was forced to rely on himself for everything, because there was no one there to help him. When he returned, he was welcomed with open arms and believed to have passed from boyhood to manhood on his long and arduous journey. Our culture does not see this as important. Our boys grow up, graduate from high school, go to college to get a job where they will work “in a box” (as Eustace Conway refers to it) and then be laid to rest, in a box. And he is right. Our lives are spent moving from one box to another, while driving a box.

The nature of a man is to find out what is beyond the limits of his community, to see things that no one else has, and to provide the best for his family so that they can continue his legacy.

My father and brother took frequent hiking trips together out to West Texas a few years ago. They slept on the ground, ate what they carried with them, and peed in the woods. No distractions, no work, no noise. Just the two of them exploring a vast wilderness that was theirs to discover. My brother will tell you that those trips are some of the most special moments in his life. Learning to be a man at peace with wildlife and the open skies above, outside the box, with a thunderstorm rumbling above your two man tent will show you how small you really are.

This is what a rite of passage is made up of: Self-reliance, courage, and honesty about yourself and your place in the world. Men today can learn a lot from Daniel Boone, Meriwether Lewis, and Eustace Conway. Masculinity is vital to the vibrancy and survival of our culture. We need men to lead, discover, and provide the way they were meant to.

Encouraging young men to actually be men is important. When they discover that they no longer have to depend on someone else for their survival, they have stepped into the realm of the Men of Destiny.